Chapter 2

Ferro & Sons has been on Ledbetter Road since 1961 and Alan Ferro's father set the stone in the ring I was holding.

I got there at nine on Monday with the receipt in my coat pocket and the ring in a bread bag, because that is what was in the drawer.

Alan is sixty-eight. He looked at the receipt for a long time before he looked at me, and then he did the decent thing, which was to stop pretending he needed to check.

"I did the work myself," he said.

"I know."

"Delia — "

"I'm not asking you to feel bad. I'm asking for the work order."

He went in the back. He was gone long enough that I heard the clock on his wall for what felt like a year. When he came out he had a manila folder and he set it on the glass and turned it toward me and did not open it, which was his way of making me the one who opened it.

The order was placed on the twenty-eighth of the month before. Paid on the ninth. Six letters. And in the box where the customer writes what he wants, in my husband's handwriting, with the same short slash on the D he puts on everything he does not intend to discuss:

*Remove existing. Cut as attached. Match original depth.*

Attached was a torn piece of notepaper with six letters on it.

"He come in and told me, hold it here, don't ring the house." Alan straightened the folder a quarter inch, which is what that man does with his hands. "It's a surprise, he says."

"Did you believe him?"

"No." Alan put both hands flat on the glass. "But he's paid me for thirty years and you don't ask a man that."

The twenty-eighth. I made myself do the arithmetic standing right there instead of in the car, because in the car I'd have cried and then I'd have driven.

The twenty-eighth was the Thursday Marguerite called the shop and told me Adrienne Cole was coming out about the will. She told me on a Thursday. He placed the order the same day.

Not a mistake, then. Not a fit of anything. A man heard a date and made an appointment.

"Alan," I said. "Can you take engraving out?"

"You can polish a band down. You lose depth. Do it twice and it's a wire."

"Could you cut a new name in it today?"

He looked at me with real alarm, which almost made me laugh.

"I'm not going to," I said. "I want to know if it's the kind of thing a person can do in an afternoon."

"Yes."

"Then that's all it ever was," I said. "An afternoon."